


to the ground

by usingmyoxygen (keithsforeheadtattoo)



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-21
Updated: 2013-09-21
Packaged: 2017-12-27 06:37:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975621
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keithsforeheadtattoo/pseuds/usingmyoxygen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the first time it happens is a victory that arrives almost too easy. goodman is at her place so that she can tell him she’s skimming, fill him in on the possibility they’ll need him soon because badger is still wary about having priors and she is still wary about everything under fring’s giant spiraling sun.</p><p>jesse makes a decision, rash and determined, to stop taking every wink saul uses to close conversations with entire fucking pillars of salt.</p><p> <br/><b>kinda-nebulous saul/jesse (with female!jesse? who knows why. lol. hetero was not my goal, it just happened)</b></p><p>  <b>SPOILER WARNING up through "confessions"! (s5ep11)</b></p>
            </blockquote>





	to the ground

he does a good job or whatever. this is the sentence jesse uses to temper the mountains of crap their new lawyer is semi-constantly spewing. he does a good job or whatever so dumbass back-handed passive aggressive dad-sounding comments are a small price to pay for not being in jail. jesse thinks sometimes about giving him a raise with the condition that he’ll have to cut out all the one-liners. jesse hates people who can’t stop being quippy, especially when they’re people handling her money.

she stands; paces the office because she’s going crazy mentally tracing every line in walt’s craggy fucking face. she sits on the edge of the desk and revels in the tiny exasperated huff it inserts in the middle of goodman’s rambling sentence. she doesn’t move after that except to twist her ass around on the uncomfortable wooden edge, disturbing a few propped-up books with her thighs.

saul gets easier to listen to once she begins a game of using every second he bullshits to fit his smarmy mouth with the perfect size of imaginary ball gag.

\- - -

walt mentions something about shared body heat and jesse gets up off her cot to sit in the driver’s seat of the RV. she stares furiously at the ignition, chewing her lip, milking every last second that she can still convince herself this is all the fault of that keyhole and not her own.

at home she’ll smoke and eat and jack off to amateur camgirls to get to sleep. she can’t seem to recreate even a shade of them in her mind, straining too hard against the usual shit. worry, sadness, whatever.

she uses people from real life instead. she’s been doing that innately since before she can remember, with coffee shop girls and crosswalk ladies and honked-at-me-in-traffic bitches. with assholes from work who are dudes, and stupid ones, but vaguely hot; enough so that in her mind when she chews them out, it’s with the added vindication of straddling them, tightly bound. her mind flits to mr. white for a single second and she spends minutes after that desperately pasting in every other face she can think of, trying to flush him from her imagination.

jesse squirms in her seat, glancing out the window at the looming night sky. there’s kinda a reason her mind keeps going to the same place in its sexual roulette, she realizes, swallowing hard as the jesse of her fantasies forcefully clears a desk of its contents with the sweep of one arm, slapping a bronzesque figure of lady justice out of her way.

\- - -

there’s a picture of jane as the backdrop on jesse’s phone. she pulls into a burger king parking lot to cry and to quickly change it to one of the mobile provider’s default images — scrolls through the same five for about an hour while panting angry nasal breaths. ripples. cartoon nature scene. close-up of a bug on a leaf. hearts and stars. a kitten in a hat.

she doesn’t cry over girls anymore, she reminds herself. she’s steeled herself against one hundred percent of this shit since freshman year of high school and fuck if she’s about to let herself swirl back down the drain because one more mysterious waify whoever isn’t in love with her. calls her just a tenant. fucked her as a joke.

jesse smokes with some dumbass from her old neighborhood because she doesn’t want to run out and buy weed and she doesn’t want to go home either.

"so who’s that new somebody you were gonna tell me about?" the dumbass asks, all shrill, when they’re three bowls in.

jesse scratches her neck uncomfortably, in the limbo of a lie forming. she could tell this bitch she won’t see again for months, if ever, about the most emotionally raw she’s been in years and probably cry in front of her and look like an idiot, or she could just—

"he’s, uh. i mean, i can’t tell you too much about him, cuz. cuz he’s a lawyer…"

\- - -

rehab is a weird flavor jesse has never tasted before. nothing made her want to get clean less than the interventions her family had staged for her so she’d never been compelled before. it’s weird to do something that most people think is good for her. it’s weird to do something good for herself because she wants to.

she knows she would never shoot up again even if paid because jane already lives in every cigarette and every half-burnt breakfast and jesse is terrified to see her face, too, in the end of every needle. she gets clean because she’s positive this is the last time anyone will offer her a favor and she might as fucking well.

\- - -

jesse comes by the office with a muffin basket. everything she’s ever learned about politeness has been from her mother. she borrows a page from mom’s book to thank her lawyer for financially and legally fucking her parents over.

"you know, the point of having money is the luxury of paying other people to do dumb shit like this for you," goodman notes when jesse plops the whole thing down in front of him unceremoniously.

"to say ‘thank you’ for me?" she scoffs. she laughs. she doesn’t do that a lot anymore and even a small smile stretches her face like saran wrap.

"just stay outta trouble, kid," saul says, still without having once looked up from a jumbled stack of forms. "or… you know what i mean."

"stay in just enough trouble to pay you," jesse says, mirroring disinterest, already halfway out the door.

a dry chuckle startles her enough to turn her a full hundred and eighty degrees back around.

"yeah," saul says, "that’s the one."

jesse might have spent a little too long reveling in the newness of what eye contact is like sober, judging by the way goodman’s expression sours into confusion.

"uh, i’ll, uh…" 

a portion of her brain flares in triumph, delighted to have ruffled someone who’s probably got flash cards of go-to comebacks in one of those desk drawers. 

"i’ll see you next time someone else in law enforcement does, all right?" he comes up with finally.

\- - -

before jesse has time to process the hiss of concern, the visual once-over, there is a cell phone in her face and an unexpected camera flash casting colored dots across her line of sight. he must’ve fulfilled his five-second quota of human emotion sans consideration of personal gain, she concludes as goodman launches into a monologue about the bruises rendering her eye fucking uselessly swollen being her “get out of jail free card”.

she wouldn’t mind being in jail. this hospital feels like a jail. being at home feels like being in jail. the only thing wrong with jail is that schrader’s neck would not be there for her to wring like a dishrag.

before schrader’s fuckface brother in law even has the audacity to ask — and ask over her, like she’s furniture, following his showy display of remorse — she already knows what happens next.

white leaves her hospital room predictably fast. goodman shocks her the most he has to date by coming back in to see her after he and walt have finished business. jesse has never seen a single facet of this human D&D die that isn’t painted only business.

he talks to her for a while; keeps her company in a way that doesn’t feel like he’s “keeping her company”, doesn’t feel obligated. jesse tries not to be conscious of this, knowing decent samaritan shit makes her tear up uncontrollably sometimes. she uses her good eye to peer into his and wonders if the guilt around his irises is telling or just a permanent, genetically encoded ring.

jesse says something off-hand, in the first fresh silence, about saul being the only person to stick around for more than fifteen minutes visiting her, and it’s like plucking a telephone wire under a bird’s feet. he suddenly has business to attend to and gets his jacket and gets his travel mug and _gets embarrassed_ , jesse thinks she sees again as his latest quip is birthed feet-first and shuffly.

it hurts to smirk, but everything hurts either way.

\- - -

the first time it happens is a victory that arrives almost too easy. goodman is at her place so that she can tell him she’s skimming, fill him in on the possibility they’ll need him soon because badger is still wary about having priors and she is still wary about everything under fring’s giant spiraling sun.

jesse makes a decision, rash and determined, to stop taking every wink saul uses to close conversations with entire fucking pillars of salt. he’s weaselly or whatever but if there’s anything she knows best about criminal types it’s how surprisingly face-value shit can get when there’s no money or products or allegiance involved.

he says, in a voice that seems to have already scoped out this possible outcome months ago, that he doesn’t usually “make it a habit to mix up legal dealings with… dealings of any other variety.”

he says it as he’s unbuttoning his shirt, though, so the _well, except meth_ jesse’s brain responded with immediately stays unvoiced.

she just laughs; says “i’m sure you’ve made worse decisions” like it’s comfort.

there are plenty of reasons, he assures her, that even his most incriminatingly linked clients all get separate confidentiality agreements.

\- - -

there is only a second time.

"i mean, we both knew this was gonna happen again," jesse, who hadn’t the slightest inkling this would ever happen again, says as she worms back into a pair of oversized jeans.

"and yet if i’d said anything along those lines to you, you’d kill me," saul shakes his head, every ounce of jaunty humor draining out of him when jesse just says "i would, yeah" without inflection.

she’s trying hard as hell lately not to be lady macbeth but it’s difficult when there’s all these eyes on her and all these eyes in her head. she’s trying not to sleep lately because when she does it’s like she can taste boetticher’s fear in some other nauseating dimension and every time she wakes up it starts bleeding through her skin and clothes like oil. she puked out the car window last night at the sight of a vegan restaurant. every plastic butter knife in her kitchen drawer is a box cutter.

she staves off going back to the legal office for fistfuls of reasons but after so long it gets to be one more thing that just needs doing. walt warns her that saul is getting paranoid about surveillance but jesse knows as soon as she walks in that goodman wouldn’t hire on a bodyguard for bugs.

violent infamy is a mountain she’d never meant to climb but she takes advantage of being stuck at its peak; “never again” are the only two words she says outside of business talk, and they’re met not with a rakish zing but a quick and serious desperation to show he understands.

\- - -

a hello kitty cell phone is, to put it mildly, not the souvenir she’d expected.

there’s nowhere on earth that doesn’t feel stained so she thinks of _ice road truckers_ and says alaska.

\- - -

jesse doesn’t remember getting in her car. jesse doesn’t remember driving back. she doesn’t remember walking in or locking the door behind her. _separate confidentiality agreements_ , she remembers, visceral, and in that second wants to reap a drop of blood for every mortal sin saul goodman has lined his pockets with; wants to rip him limb from limb in effigy of every man who has ever fucked her over irrevocably for pennies on the dollar.

he’s scared for his life and she doesn’t want to be the type of person who’ll drink up a thing like that, but it’s water right now and she can’t remember the last time she’s been outside of a desert. she doesn’t want to kill him but the idea that he would be the first insignificant stop on a tour, that his death would take long and leave streaks but be, for her, among minutia, keeps her aiming cold metal at his skull for longer than she probably needs.

the panic in goodman’s eyes isn’t like boetticher’s, isn’t even the same brand. gale was a trapped animal caught off-guard and saul is coming to the final grains of sand in an hourglass that has been running overtime.

jesse doesn’t remember what she says except that _brock_ is one of the words, standing out stark like a paper silhouette because the last time she’d said his name had been in andrea’s house before she’d wrecked that all too. she’d read him a bedtime story and then spent an hour making one up when he still couldn’t sleep. the brightly colored pattern from his bedspread thrums in and out of the walls of saul’s office.

jesse knows innately that her blood has turned to ash a long time ago.

for the past ten years or more everything she’s ever touched has burned to the ground. it doesn’t feel like a monumental leap to get ahead of everything and scorch it all on purpose.


End file.
